Ways of Looking at Body, Mind and Brain

How emotions become health problems and health problems become emotions.

I have been in the field of medical intuition for over 30 years. After I outline the emotional issues in someone’s life that I see aggravate their health, and then illuminate the symptoms in their body that are causing them “dis-ease,” more often than not people say to me, “Dr. Mona Lisa, you don’t understand. My problem isn’t in my head, it’s in my body.” I say, “I know, it’s both. It’s because your head is part of your body.”

Using medical intuition, you will learn how certain emotional patterns are associated with certain physical symptoms in the body. And when it comes to healing the mind, you will learn to create wholeness by treating both the brain and the body, by learning that the brain may be the first sign that a major illness is beginning to brew in the body. So if you’ve had new or even chronic depression, irritability, moodiness, anxiety, and problems with attention, brain fog memory, and addiction, this is the chapter for you. You may just get the key to some additional solutions for finding peace and using your potential.

Louise Hay’s first book, Heal Your Body, lays out the mental causes for physical illnesses and the metaphysical ways to overcome them. Note that Louise never makes a distinction between brain and body. Despite the book’s title, among the listed disorders, ailments of the brain are never listed separately from ailments of the body. Allergies are listed alongside Alzheimer’s. You’ll see amnesia next to anemia. To think that fear, anger, sadness, and deficiency in love and joy are somehow separate from anemia, Alzheimer’s, pain, and suffering seems pretty reasonable. Back then in the ’70s, she equated body and mind, brain and body, physical health and emotional health. It’s taken us 40 years to catch up. Maybe we’re still trying to.

According to Louise, if you have a health problem, it’s considered an excess of fear, anger, or sadness, or a deficiency in love and joy, and this can be changed with a new thought pattern. For example, say you have a problem with depression. According to Louise, the thought pattern behind this is apathy—a resistance to feeling, a deadening of self, and fear. So you change that thought pattern to “It is safe to feel. I open myself to life. I am willing to experience life.” In a way, what Louise is doing to change the thought patterns in depression is very similar to what we do in cognitive behavioral therapy in psychiatry today. She addresses a body problem in the same way. We simply look at the thought pattern, find the affirmation, and change our reasoning. For example, cardiovascular disease. Louise says cardiovascular disease has to do with difficulty carrying the joy of life, a deficiency in joy. So, to lessen your tendency toward that, you would change the thought pattern by doing the affirmation “I am filled with joy. It flows with me in every beat of my heart.” And so on. According to Louise, whether there’s a problem in the mind or the body, the therapeutic solution is the same.

You find the unhealthy thought pattern, the excess or deficient emotion. You change the thought. You add the emotion that’s missing—usually joy and love—and you move on to health. If you were a sophisticated scientist who’d spent years in brain science, neuroanatomy, or had done a psychiatric residency, or accumulated, say, $275,000 in student loans (who might that be?), you might think that that was simplistic and whistle in offense. You might even say to yourself, “The audacity of this woman, to think that such a simple method could work!” However, then during your training in psychiatry (if you’ve figured it out, this is me), you would find that the father of cognitive behavioral therapy, Aaron Beck, devised treatment plans to change people’s thoughts, and this is the basis behind how cognitive behavioral therapy is done in psychiatry today. The protocols, or “recipes,” of cognitive behavioral therapy are similar statements—though more convoluted—to the ones Louise Hay uses in her slim book. Statements to treat anxiety, depression, anger. And we know now in the 21st century that many of those emotions, if sustained, increase our chance toward a variety of unrelenting health problems such as heart disease, cancers, dementia, diabetes, obesity, chronic pain, immune system disorders, and the like.

The Science of Medical Intuition: How Emotions Become Health Problems and Health Problems Become Emotions

Emotions register as symptoms in your body, and the beginning of illness in your body may be first noticed only as an emotion like fear, anger, sadness, or brain fog. In Chapter 1, we talked about an emotion-disease domino effect in which, if an emotion or a mood is held for very long, it sets off cascades of inflammatory mediators. If you feel long-term depression, anxiety, panic, or sadness, the mood gets transferred to your brain stem or your adrenal gland, epinephrine and cortisol are released, then inflammatory mediators like cytokines and others cause a domino effect of changes in your body. Fever, weakness, lethargy, then a virus or allergy, then over time hormonal changes, arthritis, cholesterol, insulin, blood pressure, and weight problems, addiction, and other body problems spiral out of control.

Similarly, if you have a health problem in your body, there is a disease-mood domino effect. Whether it’s an overgrowth in bacteria in your bowel with a release of inflammation molecules, endotoxins, that leak into your blood and then travel into your brain, making you feel depressed, anxious or irritable; or inflammatory mediators, such as TNF-alpha and others, of rheumatoid arthritis and other autoimmune disorders leaking out from your achy joints into your blood system, into your brain, causing you to feel lethargic, weepy, tearful, irritable, edgy, and snappy.

You may not even know you’re having another “flare-up” of your autoimmune problem until you get in an argument out of the blue with a loved one over nothing, really. Then you realize that you’re sick again and that the only sign to you that your joint problem is going south is that switch in your mood. And finally, you may be in remission for your lung cancer, sailing through life with utter relief, when out of the blue you feel depressed. Even though you are tearful and have brain fog, you take a fearless inventory of your life to find out what might be depressing you—and you don’t find anything. Only to go to your next checkup and have your doctor find out that you have a tiny tumor in your lung. Your doctor says you have a disorder that comes along with cancer called a paraneoplastic syndrome that releases chemicals from your lung into your blood that travel to your brain and make you feel depressed and act loopy. In all of these cases in which there is a body-brain domino effect, mood, anxiety, irritability, and attention problems were only the first symptom that intuitively pointed out to you that something was up in your body. In this chapter, Louise and I want to help you truly create wholeness in your mind. To really heal our mind and create wholeness, we need to heal the brain and the body simultaneously.

Healing the mind, in fact, is understanding that body and mind are merely parts of one whole being. So if you have had short-term or even long-term depression, irritability, moodiness, or anxiety problems, not to mention short or long-term health problems, step into the All Is Well Clinic. By addressing those aspects in your body that may also be affecting your mood, sense of peace, and capacity to use all of your intellect, you will be on your path to total healing.

This excerpt has been reprinted with permission from Heal Your Mind: Your Prescription for Wholeness through Medicine, Affirmations, and Intuition by Mona Lisa Schulz, M.D., Ph.D., with Louise Hay.